Awk strftime on Mac OS X

Question

The following command on my Mac (10.6) gives me an undefined function error:

$ awk 'BEGIN{now=strftime("%D", systime()); print now}'
awk: calling undefined function strftime
 source line number 1

On a Red Hat system, I get the expected result:

$ awk 'BEGIN{now=strftime("%D", systime()); print now}'
12/01/09

What's the deal here?

Answer 1

You're relying on an extension to awk that's present in whichever variant (gawk, mawk, nawk, etc.) your Red Hat system happens to be using. See the Standard Unix Specification's awk description for what you can expect as a baseline for awk.

Answer 2

strftime is a GNU gawk extension. If you want to use strftime, download GNU gawk and install on your Mac. Otherwise, there are other tools like Perl/Python you can use. Check if you have them on your Mac